Media literacy Caribbean project enters new phase with on-the-ground kick-off in Barbados 

6th November 2024

The in-person visits to Caribbean schools and newsrooms form part of wider activities taking place in Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad & Tobago during November. 

The Public Media Alliance (PMA) has kicked off its series of in-country activities as part of the “Building the Caribbean’s Next Generation of Media Literate Citizens” project on 5 November with visits in Barbados. 

The Barbados Community College (BCC) was the starting point for the activities, with an assembly and Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Pop-Up taking place on the Bridgetown campus. The assembly was geared towards 25 students studying mass communications and media & journalism. Students learned about the current state of misinformation and disinformation, particularly in Barbados, and explored practical approaches to identifying, fact-checking, and combating false information, including AI’s role in disinformation and strategies for responsible sharing, culminating in group exercises to understand the thought processes of disinformation actors. Meanwhile, the pop-up opened the sessions to the wider student population and covered similar topics. 

Of note was the premiere of PMA’s card game, Thumbs Down: A Media Literacy Game, that was developed specifically for this project. Thumbs Down, similar to the popular party game Taboo, is a word–guessing game where players race against the clock to get their teammates to guess a media literacy word or term without using the word itself, or any of the “thumbs down” words listed on the card. Each card also features a definition.  

What more to expect?

PMA’s Project & Advocacy Coordinator Desilon Daniels will continue her travels through the Caribbean, with visits scheduled in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and Guyana. She will be joined by facilitators Nazima Raghubir of the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) in Barbados and Guyana, and Kiran Maharaj of the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago. Representatives from the UNESCO Office for the Caribbean will also join the team in Jamaica. 

The activities in the other three countries will focus more on primary and secondary schoolchildren. In each country, the team will visit four schools (two primary schools and two secondary schools). Altogether, these schools will represent more than 300 schoolchildren who will benefit from discussions on digital literacy and news literacy, and will engage in interactive sessions, such as developing digital safety superhero posters and creating news segments.  

“Our time in Barbados has already been fruitful, and has made us quite excited for our visits to the other countries,” Daniels said. “The students’ enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, and high level of participation demonstrate that this work is necessary and welcomed, and hints at a promising future for the Caribbean’s next generation of citizens.” 

The project is being implemented by the Public Media Alliance and its regional partners, the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) and the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM). It is supported by the UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean and UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC).